Advisory Board

Advisory Council & Board

Six Seconds is guided by an accomplished group of advisors and advocates:

Peter Salovey, Ph.D.

Peter Salovey and his colleague Jack Mayer defined and tested the concept of emotional intelligence; they wrote the seminal papers in the field in the early 1990s that launched the international scientific EQ movement.

Dr. Salovey is now President of Yale University, as well as Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology and former chair of the Psychology Department at Yale.

He has written or edited eight books and has authored more than 200 scientific publications – including The Wisdom in Feelings, The Emotionally Intelligent Manager, and Emotional Development and Emotional Intelligence. Professor Salovey is a founding editor of the Review of General Psychology and an associate editor of the new APA journal, Emotion. His course in Psychology and Law was the most popular course in Yale University history. He is a Justice of the Peace and a licensed psychologist in the State of Connecticut. In his leisure time, he plays stand-up bass with the Professors of Bluegrass.

Karen McCown, MA

Karen began her involvement with emotional intelligence when she founded the Nueva School (Hillsborough, California) in 1967. In planning the school she met with educators, political & business leaders and Nobel Laureates to consider the educational needs of our society. She saw that the central foundation of a school should be not simply giving students knowledge, but giving them the opportunity to develop wisdom. She created the nation’s first emotional intelligence curriculum, Self Science, a program she facilitated for nearly 3 decades. Karen is the Chairman of the Board for Six Seconds.

Ayman Sawaf

An entrepreneur and executive, after starting numerous businesses, Ayman focused on creating wellness. In 1989, Ayman founded and funded Enchante Entertainment (www.kidseq.com), a media company dedicated to promoting Emotional literacy in schools and for families. Enchante published the Emotional Literacy Series and created, produced and released two award-winning feature films and three television series for children. These were created in conjunction with media partners SONY, Warner Brothers and HBO, along with producers Norman Lear, actress Shelly Duvall and former Disney animator Jim George.

In 1993 Ayman co-founded FEEL, the Foundation for Education in Emotional Literacy (www.feel.org), the first nonprofit organization committed to raising awareness for emotional literacy In 1997, FEEL merged with 6seconds, creating an umbrella organization dedicated to promoting the understanding and practice of emotional intelligence in schools, families, organizations and communities.

With Dr Robert Cooper, Ayman’s international best-selling book, Executive EQ, Emotional intelligence in leadership and organizations, released in 1996, was the first book to bring the emotional intelligence concept into the business world. Ayman’s current work includes a new book titled Sacred Commerce: Stories from the Merchant Priesthood, the story of how business and spirituality have walked hand in hand in our history and can do so today. Ayman is illustrating Sacred Commerce through the WholeLife Centers and Urth.TV, a social network for people who value greater consciousness, healthy living and a sustainable planet, where he will introduce the Sacred Commerce Platform.

Robert K. Cooper, Ph.D

Praised as “a national treasure” by Stanford Business School Professor Michael Ray and named “the ultimate business guru for the new millennium” by USA Today (July 16, 2001), in recent years Robert Cooper has been the highest-rated faculty member in the Lessons in Leadership Distinguished Speaker Series™ sponsored by universities and business schools from coast to coast.

Cooper’s credits include Get Out of Your Own Way: The 5 Keys to Surpassing Everyone’s Expectations, The Other 90%: How to Unlock Your Vast Untapped Potential for Leadership and Life and co-authored the best-selling Executive EQ: Emotional Intelligence in Leadership & Organizations.

Jeanne Segal, Ph.D.

As a practicing psychologist, public speaker, and respected author she has been developing skills to help others for more than 25 years. As a young psychologist, Dr. Segal worked with pioneers Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, and Carl Rogers and sat on the board of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. She traveled with other humanistic psychologists on a peace mission to the former USSR at the height of the Cold War. Since that time, in physicians’ offices, clinics, hospitals, hospices, private practice, training programs, workshops, and seminars, and through her writings, she has continued to explore and develop new ways of expanding emotional awareness and improving emotional management.

Dr Segal’s books include Living Beyond Fear: Coping with the Emotional Aspects of Life-Threatening Illness (Ballantine, 1989) and Raising Your Emotional Intelligence: A Practical Guide for Harnessing the Power of Your Instincts and Emotions (Holt, 1997).

Dr. Segal has received numerous awards for her community service. She has been a faculty member at University Without Walls and International College in Los Angeles and has served as a consultant to the California Governor’s Council on Wellness and Fitness in the Schools.

George McCown

Chairman, World Business Academy, and Chairman and Managing Director of MDC, a private investment firm that partners with management teams to buy and build “Companies That Make a Difference.” He is also a Managing Director of the American Infrastructure MLP Funds, an innovative family of private investment funds targeting the outperforming asset class of Master Limited Partnerships.

Before co-founding MDC in 1984, Mr. McCown spent 18 years at Boise Cascade Corporation in a series of general management positions. He was Senior Vice President, Building Materials Group and President, Boise Cascade Home and Land Corporation at his departure. He received an MBA from Harvard University where he served as assistant to Professor Georges F. Doriot (founder of the U.S. venture capital industry), and a BS in mechanical engineering from Stanford University, where he served as a trustee during the 1980’s, chairing the Finance and Investment Policy Subcommittees. He has served as Chairman, Vice Chairman or director of over 30 public and private companies and currently is a Founding Board Member of ChrysCap, India’s first indigenous private equity firm. George also serves on the Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution & Peace and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He is a Director of Outward Bound USA (Finance Committee Chairman), The American Himalayan Foundation and the Bay Area Council. He works closely with the Central Asia Institute, which builds schools in the remote mountain regions of Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Rinaldo Brutoco

International executive, writer and keynote speaker for over twenty five years, Rinaldo Brutoco is a practical visionary, change agent and futurist. Rinaldo uniquely combines theory and practice to assist executives and organizations in adapting to change with “breakthrough” ideas.

Rinaldo has served on the board of The Men’s Wearhouse, a $2-billion-dollar retail sales New York Stock Exchange company, for over a decade from its initial IPO to the present time. During that same time period, he was CEO and Chairman of the Red Rose Collection, which was named for three consecutive years to INC Magazine’s 500 fastest growing privately held companies.

In Memoriam: Candace Pert, Ph.D.

Dr. Pert served as a member of Six Seconds’ advisory board from 2002 until her death in 2013.

Dr. Candace Pert was an internationally recognized pharmacologist who has published over 250 scientific articles on peptides and their receptors and the role of these neuropeptides in the immune system. Dr. Candace Pert received her Ph.D. in pharmacology from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, served as Chief of the Section on Brain Biochemistry of the Clinical Neuroscience Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), held a Research Professorship in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, DC, and then served as the Scientific Director of RAPID Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

In the mid-1980’s, while researching the function of classical immune cell receptors, such as CD4, in brain, Dr. Pert, with her collaborator Dr. Michael Ruff, developed the first of a new class of treatments for HIV/AIDS, the viral entry inhibitor Peptide T. This non-toxic experimental therapeutic blocks the virus from binding to its cellular chemokine receptor CCR5 and infecting the cell. Recent human studies show that Peptide T substantially reduces HIV in the blood and the treatment resistant, persistently infected cellular reservoirs which do not respond to current therapies.

Dr. Pert holds a number of patents for modified peptides in the treatment of psoriasis, Alzheimer’s disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, stroke and head trauma. One of these, peptide T, is currently undergoing research, in the United States, for the treatment of AIDS and neuroAIDS.

Six Seconds is a community of changemakers contributing to a world of insight, connection, and purpose.

We think the world would be a better place if a billion people were practicing the skills of emotional intelligence (EQ). So, we research and share scientific, global, transformational tools & methods to support that goal.

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